"Ballgowns" exhibit at the V&A Museum

Last spring The V&A Museum open the renovated Fashion exhibition space with the show  Ballgowns: British Glamour Since 1950.  There are two videos in the webpage for the exhibit, one of them about a fashion show at Highclere Castle, so famous now for the tv series Downton Abbey.

The video can be watch here,

from the V&A webpage

Garden Museum London, activities in October

An interesting Agenda from the Garden Museum for those in London.

The Gordiola glass museum, Mallorca

The Gordiola glass museum in Algaida, Mallorca, shows the ancestral technique of blowing glass in the islalnd.  The industry is run by the Gordiola family and dates back to 1719, and the production has evolved from domestic pieces to a more artistic creations.  The premises house a production section with furnaces still working, a shop and a small museum.

Preparing for a museum visit - The Met Museum plan

Another image of a museum

Met Museum/~/museummap

Stedelijk Museum re-opens in Amsterdam

 The Stedelijk Museum opens on September 23rd, after a decade of renovation and ready to regain its prominent position in the arts scene, as its mission statement makes clear:

The Stedelijk Museum is an international institution in Amsterdam dedicated to modern and contemporary art and design. The Museum aims to provide a home for art, artists and a broad range of publics, where artistic production is actively fostered, presented, protected, reconsidered and renewed. (from the website)

The museum is offering a complete program of exhibitions and a new organization of the collection, the website includes links to every social media and the channels in youtube "stedelijkmuseum" and vimeo "stedelijk" where activity has been continuous during the time the museums was closed.

Reflecting fashion, exhibit at Mumok, Museum Modern Art, Viena

Reflecting fashion  exhibit at Mumok in Viena, Austria till the end of September'12.  An exhibition about relation between/of/about/around, .... art and fashion.  Another attraction for summer cultural tourism?

The website's section for the show offers good informations and source for documentation, including a video with the talk "Is fashion art" by Valerie Steele

Stone work school

Recovering traditions: masonry 

Junipero Serra's Historic House in Petra (Majorca, Spain)

Junípero Serra's Historic House

One of the El Camino Real bells

The Tanks, new space Tate Modern in London opens tomorrow

New space for Tate Modern in London, The Tanks: Art in action is a underground space that will be dedicated, though temporarely because it will close in October, to live events, installation art, dance, perfomance, etc.

It starts tomorrow with different events, being one of them Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker's 1982 piece Fase with music by Steve Reich.  For more information, this is the Live programme

This temporary space could weel be part of the celebrations for the Olympics 2012 in London, but it is always an exciting experience to visit the Tate Modern, waiting for the provocative opening of the extension of the actual building due in 2016.  

Museum der Kuturen in Basel

The Museum der Kulturen, in Basel (Switzerland), is an institution whose mission statement reads:

"... a place for encounters and inspiration- ... wants to foster cultural life in and around Basel, but also nationally, with attractive, exciting exhibitions and a wide variety of events"

The museum is now offering in their program two interesting exhibitons.  One is Expeditions. The world in a suitcase an interesting view of travelling and pilgrimage with a calendar of activities on the subject. 

image from the museum's website

The second exhibit is about textiles and costume in the Miau people, Iridiscent: Everyday wear – Indigo, luster and pleats, that shows a collection of textiles and pieces made by dying and pleating, that are the amazing indigo pleated skirts the Miao women wear.

image from the museum's website

Exhibit "Garden Open Today: 300 Years of Garden Visiting"

Last days to visit this exhibition if you are in London before June 24th, the exhibit Garden Open Today: 300 Years of Garden Visiting at the Garden Museum.

International Museums Day - Celebrating "Museums in a changing wrld, 2012"

"Museums in a changing world" the International Museums Day, a date to celebrate the importance of museums as cultural and social institutions.

Exhibit at The Met, "Schiaparelly and Prada"

A very interesting exhibit opens tomorrow at The Met Schiaparelli and Prada: impossible conversations
Just from the images on the web, it looks is going definitely to bring some inspiration, but also controversy. Let's wait till videos are charge into the web.

Museum Volkenkunde Leiden - collection of hats

Textile hats from the collection of Museum Volkenkunde Leiden.

Ivorypress launches book by Isidoro Valcárcel-Medina

ilimit, a new book by Spanish artist Isidoro Valcárcel-Medina, (Murcia, 1937), 2007 Spain's national award for Visual Arts, was presented last month at ivorypress, Madrid:

Isidoro Valcárcel Medina (Murcia, Spain, 1937) is one of the foremost representatives of Spanish conceptual art and the 2007 winner of Spain’s National Award for the Visual Arts. In this Artist’s Book, Valcárcel Medina explores the comparison between the limited and the unlimited while proposing a reflection on seriation and exclusivity, two recurring concepts in the art world.

Each of the volumes of ilimit, created in an edition of nine and two artist proofs, is unique, signed and numbered by the artist and consists of 500 pages. The content of these pages is solely their numbering, correlative in volume after volume, from page 1 up to page 6000. This page numbering is written using ordinal numbers in different languages, chosen randomly from a total selection of 58 languages. 

It is a fantastic work coming from one of the most important and interesting artist in current art scene.
Read more here

Valencia (Spain) walking within museums and architecture

Interesting blog about museums and fashion

I have been follwing this blog Exhibiting Fashion, by a New York based museum professional ( from the about page, but I still do not get why not sharing name) for sometime now and I can say I read with interest and curiosity.  It is simple, as in clear and straightforward, in the layout and design, with good content, rich in comments and visuals and with international information.  I definitely recommend reading it.

"From Garden City to Green City", exhibit at the Garden Museum (London)

From Garden City to Green City is an eloquent and appropriate exhibit to raise awareness about the "green movement" at the Garden Museum in London (GB)


The concept is expressed as:

From Garden City to Green City, explores the many visions, designs and projects that have inspired the ‘green city’ movement over the last 150 years.....

MSK Ghent, entrance to the Museum of Fine Arts

The MSK Ghent, is the Museum of FIne Arts in Gent (BE).  They have launched a new website iwth content in different languages, which makes easier to receive international recognition.  This post is about the reception-entrance area, which at the time the pictures were taken offers a seasonal christmas decoration.

The area is an open plan self-explanatory room with an easy access from the exterior and a easy reading of the possibilities the entrace is ofering.  As a four walls- four doors room, there is no doubt what to do: seeking information, entering the exhibiton spaces, heading to the cafeteria/restaurant or reaching the museum shop.

Though the building's architecture is massive, the entrance is quite minimal but has the advantage of a glass ceiling which gives an airy atmosphere to the space.

You can also discover the Flemish Art Collection: 

... is the structural partnership between three art-historical museums in Flanders: The Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp, the Groeninge Museum Bruges and the Museum of Fine Arts Ghent. (from the website)

housed in the three above referenced museums, the catalogue offers detailed information.

"Indian Jewelry" exhibtion in Museum Volkenkunde, Leiden (NL)

A recent visit to the Museum Volkenkunde in Leiden, offered a nice surprise in the form of a small exhibit about "Contemporary Indian Jewelry".  The museum is going under renovation and it is due to re-open in fal 2012, therefore the collections/exhibitions on display and amount od spaces open to public are limited.

The exhibit is the part of the museum currently open to public, in the main room dedicated to Asia but in a small space, which is not a problem to offer some substanctial content about the subject.  It is curated by Saskia Konniger, who is researching for the museum about Indian traditions, and has conceived the show after two field trips to several regions in India: Rajasthan (Bikaner and Jaipur) to study the work of goldsmiths. After the trips, her findings has incoporated some new pieces into the museum's collection.

general view of the exhibition

I found the exhibit very appealing, condensed and well presented both in terms of pieces and layout, though the cases where the pieces were shown had too many reflects and the quality of craftmanship was at times difficult to be appreciated.

Panels and labels and auviovisuals were instructive, as well as the wall covered by photos and images from (we must guess) the researcher's travels together with and local iconography.  That was a touch of artistic connection with the pieces shown that converged with the anthropological vision, as an inmersion into some aspects of Indian culture.

The catalogue contains good visual documentation, but (as informed from the museum's desk) it has only been published in Dutch, which from a quick reading is a pit,y for it surely contains valuable information that would allow to better understand the content of the exhibition.

Images of some of the pieces on display: